Building Flexibility in Electronic Resource

Management

Gerald Steeman and Jane WagnerNASA Langley Research Center

InfoToday 2002, New York, NY

May 16, 2002

Where is NASA Langley?

What Do Folks at Langley Do? • Aeronautics

Caption: 3%-Scale BWB-LSV Langley 14x22 Wind Tunnel Model.

What Do Folks at Langley Do?

• Earth Science

Image of water vapor from Geostationary

Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)

What Do Folks at Langley Do?

• Space Technology

A Langley-based team of researchers successfully completed the 77-

day aerobraking phase of the Mars Odyssey mission

What Do Folks at Langley Do?

• Structures and Materials

Astronaut Linda M. Godwin, trains with the Mir Environmental Effects

Payload (MEEP) in a NASA Langley Research Center clean room.

What Do Folks at Langley Do?

• Special Research Projects

Langley scientists use a non-invasive instrument to determine the relative humidity inside the encasement of the U.S. Constitution for the National Archives.

To the Business at Hand…

Barrel jousting at the 1929 Langley Laboratory annual picnic

Early Management of Electronic Journals at Langley• The medium drove the process early on

– Web people ended up doing serials and cataloging functions

– Web lists of journals continually out-of-date

– 856s started to “crop up” in the catalog – Statistics on use spotty, at best

Use the Catalog!

• Heeded Marilyn Geller advice @ 1995– treat electronic journals no differently than

conventional ones

• Made catalog the authoritative source for maintaining all electronic journal information:– URLs (856s), Holdings, “access claiming”

POCs, and administrative user information

Really Use the Catalog!

• Developed catalog tagging and scripts to pull cataloged title and URL info into Web pages

• Set up pre-defined search screens in catalog focused on electronic resources

• Created and modified open-source scripts for collecting statistics and link checking

Coding MARC Records

• The catalogers agreed on certain subfields not previously used in the 856 and the local notes fields. These subfields are hidden from public display.

• The 856 was coded so the script creating an external page could select the right URL.

Coding Continued

• The local notes fields for each NASA center were coded with type and subject flags.

• We are using 11-14 subject flags and 7 type flags to create targeted lists.

Within the Catalog

• We can create predefined searches within our Webcat interface, so users can see the targeted resources.

• Note that subject lists come from the subject codes in the local notes field, not from the normal subject fields such as the 650. We wanted to control what resources appeared in these lists.

Electronic Resource Lists Available in WebCat as Predefined Searches

WebCat Electronic ResourceSubject List

External Web Pages

• With shell and Perl scripts, we can also pull these records out of the catalog and create external web pages. These pages are another way to highlight selected electronic resources for users. Each title has a link back to the catalog record as well as a link to the resource.

• The pages are automatically updated weekly by a cron job. Manual maintenance is required only if the boilerplate text or search criteria change.

Electronic Journal Web Page

Research Database Web Page

Gathering Statistics

• Both the WebCat URLs and the URLs on our external electronic resource web pages call a CGI script which logs usage and redirects to the title.

• We are able to get counts for usage by title and by NASA center, not only for the targeted electronic resources but for all of our URLs.

• We are developing new scripts to further break down the usage information; this should help us decide which subscriptions to continue.

Elsevier vs. Langley script stats

Title (Elsevier Titles in BOLD)TL

SessionElsevier

DownloadTotal

Sessions

Total Elsevier

DownloadsActa astronautica. 3 25 38 80Advances in space research : the official journal of the

Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). 2 6 18 49Aerospace science and technology. 8 13 50 49Aircraft design. 5 10 39 83Aircraft engineering and aerospace technology. 4 n/a 28 n/aApplied acoustics. Acoustique appliquâe. Angewandte

Akustik. 3 0 15 9Automatica : the journal of IFAC, the International

Federation of Automatic Control. 3 7 21 57Composite structures. 6 78 19 191Composites science and technology. 8 33 25 164Composites. Part A, Applied science and

manufacturing. 7 11 15 125Composites. Part B, Engineering. 1 14 11 67Computational mechanics. 1 n/a 30 n/aComputers & structures. 0 4 26 68Engineering analysis with boundary elements. 0 0 9 10

September-01

# of sessions logged via CGI scripts

# of downloaded articles per Elsevier8038

Conclusions• Limitations

– You only get what your catalog has

– Added risk in customizing vendor system

– Not as flexible as typical SQL database solutions

• Benefits– One source published many ways

– Capitalizes on the work already established in the catalog

– Creates interaction between web pages and catalog

• Other Considerations– Serials Solutions™

– Serials vendors